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Goombah is a music discovery tool that helps you find music.  Unlike recent music discovery offerings such as iLike and Qloud, Goombah is not  a web 2.0, Ajax-laden web 2.0 app.  Instead, it is a standalone app that you download, install and run (just like in them there olden days). Goombah uses your iTunes play history so don't bother trying Goombah if you are not an iTunes user. (Linux/Solaris folks are left out to dry - no iTunes, and no Goombah for us).  The first time you run Goombah, you get a user/account name and go through the enrolling process. This takes about 20 minutes - during this time Goombah extracts info from your iTunes library, sends it back to the Goombah server where it churns through your collection (not the audio, just the artists, albums, songs and playcounts), builds a model for you so it can match you up with songs and similar users.  Once this enrollment process is done, you are ready to use Goombah.  

 Goombah does 3 things for you:

1. It gives you recommendations based upon your listening habits
2. It lets you browse the collections of other Goombah users, in particular similar users
   
3. It lets you download free music.

The recommendations I received from Goombah were really quite good - first of all, there were very few 'obvious' recommendations.  They didn't recommend The Beatles, or U2 or Radiohead.  There were no clunker recommendations (iLike is still telling me that I should try the The Chimpmunk Song  by The Chimpmunks). And the recommendations that I previewed I actually liked - I found half-a-dozen songs that sounded really interesting that I hadn't heard before in just a few minutes with the recommender.

I did try to look at some of the users Goombah suggested would be similar to me.  I found that the users didn't seem to be too similar. There's no 'compatibility score' like there is in iLike or last.fm - just an ordered list of similar users.  I don't think Goombah has enough users yet to really hook me up with people with similar tastes.   The users that I looked at, who were 'similar', didn't really share my music taste - and so I didn't find this feature too interesting. But, as the Goombah user base grows this could be more interesting.  I do remember the old-time Napster, browsing another user's collection was my first online music discovery experience - I found lots of interesting music that way.

 Goombah also recommends 'new, free music' that you can download. The tracks I tried were all keepers that I will be listening too again (much better than my hype-machine track record). 

The Goombah app does have a few warts.  It was slow to scroll through large collections of music.  While it was downloading music, the Goombah app could do nothing but let  watch the download progress bar.  Every time I adjusted the 'Adventurous' setting, it insisted on putting up a rather annoying dialog box.  The iTunes integration was a bit fragile -  I could preview songs via iTunes, but sometimes I had to click two or three times to make it happen. Also, Goobah uses BitTorrent to download data from Goombah central to my computer - I'm not sure if I want to open up extra ports in my firewall to make it easier for Goombah .    All of these things (well, perhaps with the exception of the BitTorrent thing) can be expected in a  new app.  (They are not at version 1.0 yet).

 I really like the simplicity of Goombah. It doesn't try to be a MySpace clone, it doesn't bother helping me send messages to people, it doesn't do tagging, album art, artist bios. It is just an app that I can use to get music recommendations -  and they've really done a good job at giving me good recommendations.